TXT Unless by Carol Shields amazon italian book portable writer

UPDATE May 2016: Just found out this is going to be a movie, starring Catherine Keener as Reta! It will probably play the Toronto Film Festival in the fall. Looking forward to it!***In Carol Shields’s Unless, Reta Winters, a happy, middle-aged novelist and translator, a wife and mother of three children, discovers that her 19-year-old daughter has dropped out of university and is panhandling on the streets of Toronto holding a sign that reads “Goodness.” That one-sentence synopsis, while accurate, doesn’t begin to suggest the rich detail and generosity of spirit behind Shields’s final novel.The book is partly a mystery, an attempt to solve the question: “What happened?” As Reta fills in details about her husband, her children, her neighbours, her friends, her mother-in-law, the eminent French writer whose memoirs she’s been translating for years, we begin to get a sense of the rhythms and layers of her life – of anyone’s life, really.And then there are the characters in Reta’s new novel, a sequel to her light comedy My Thyme Is Up. As she sinks deeper into despair, unable to protect her homeless daughter, she focuses on moving the lives of her characters around to their inevitably happy ending.This passage is key:A life is full of isolated events, but these events, if they are to form a coherent narrative, require odd pieces of language, little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define, since they are abstractions of location or relative position, words like therefore, else, other, also, thereof, heretofore, instead, otherwise, despite, already, and not yet.Each chapter in this book – and indeed the book’s title itself – takes its name from one of those “odd pieces of language.” And gradually the details begin to form a coherent whole.So many scenes made me reflect on my own life, recognize how certain moments can be so fleeting. Shields helps capture them in all their wonderful ordinariness. After an exchange between Reta and one of her daughters, Reta thinks: When she looks back on her life, when she’s a fifty-year-old Natalie, post-menopausal, savvy, sharp, a golf player, a maker of real estate deals, or eighty years old and rickety of bone, confined to a wheelchair – whatever she becomes she’ll never remember this exchange between the two of us outside the bathroom door… Her life is building upward and outward, and so is Chris’s. They don’t know it, but they’re in the midst of editing the childhood they want to remember and getting ready to live as we all have to live eventually, without our mothers. Three-quarters of their weight is memory at this point. I have no idea what they’ll discard or what they’ll decide to retain and embellish, and I have no certainty, either, of their ability to make sustaining choices.So much clear-eyed wisdom about life. I could go on quoting passages – there are so many – but Ill let you experience them yourselves.

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